Google kills Wave due to lack of interest

Google will close Wave by the end of the year

Google is to halt all development of its Wave collaboration platform, citing lack of interest.

The platform was launched as an invitation-only service at the 2009 Google I/O conference, and opened to the public in May. Wave proved popular with developers, but the wider world has been less than enthusiastic.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," said Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of operations, in a blog post.

"We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."

Hölzle explained that large sections of the Wave code, such as drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, have been open sourced and given to the developer community.

Observers are now speculating that Buzz, Google's social networking platform that has failed to ignite the interest of the business community or the wider public, may be next on the chopping block.